No Stars on a Crew (or "No One Ever Hurts a Crew By Quitting")

"Never say never" tends to be a pretty good aphorism for rowing coaches or anyone else.  Thor Nilsen said Brad Lewis would never be a champion, and at the time he said it, that was probably a pretty good bet in the eyes of most rowers.  1984 shot that statement full of holes.  "You'll never win races if you don't stop lunging at the catch/hesitating at the release/getting too much layback/etc." takes a beating season after season.  Crews with laid-back coaches win races.  So do crews with intense, militaristic, "do-it-my-way-or-get-the-hell-out" coaches.  So there appear to be very few absolutes in the coaching of successful rowers and scullers, but here's one that's pretty damn close: Never allow an athlete to think that s/he's more important than any other hard-working member of your crew.  And its first corollary is as follows: never allow a crew to regard any individual as more vital to the crew's success than any other member of the crew. 

I could probably write or speak about this topic for days on end and not run out of material.  "There are no stars in rowing" was one of my first coach's favorite refrains, and like many such things, it has progressively gained resonance and made more and more sense with each passing year.  It's as true now as it was when I started rowing in 1987; something that is nearly absolutely true can't get any truer, after all.  But for the sake of anyone reading who isn't already a member of the choir, I'll move on to anecdotes and examples. 

I once had a conversation with another coach about an athlete we both know and have coached who has all the talent and ability she'll ever need and who has had some noteworthy successes but more often than not, performs below expectations - both her own and those of her coaches.  The other coach had known this athlete during her scholastic rowing days and said "You know, when she was rowing eights, her coaches always sort of treated her like she was the franchise player - they even sort of said so publicly and in a way that she knew they thought so."  And I thought "bingo - that's what's held her back.  People whose judgment she trusts have given her the impression that it's the other eight jokers in the boat who are sullying her shot at greatness."  And once an athlete is in that mental/psychic space, she's as good as done until she gets back to the combination of confidence, humility, and willingness to train and race like a crazed animal that really moves boats. 

Similarly, I know an athlete whose physiological numbers are off the charts but who somehow hasn't been in very many fast team boats since his high-water mark as a high school rower.  He graduated from college having been part of a crew that didn't do a lot of winning during his tenure in the varsity eight.  Curiously, the same school's current  varsity eight, while by all available accounts lacking anyone of this athlete's abilities, has been achieving remarkably superior results since his departure.  Granted that there could be thousands upon thousands of reasons for that crew's turnaround, one still scratches one's head and wonders how many of those thousands had "I know I'm making the boat go fast - what's the matter with the rest of these nimrods?" as a contributing factor.  All it takes to poison a crew is one guy (or girl, or coach) with even a hint of suspicion that his fellow rowers aren't entirely worthy. 

I remember, too, the guy on my own collegiate crew who came to be widely regarded as our wheel horse.  Fastest on the erg, always in the varsity eight from the fall of his sophomore year onward, etc.  As a senior, virtually everyone assumed he was unbeatable and that we should just go ahead and write his name in Sharpie on six seat of the varsity eight. Our coaches hadn't even seat raced him during his junior year.  Fortunately for us, we had a wise coach that year who did seat race him against three of the other port oars from both the 1V and 2V eights. Astonishingly, he lost twice and narrowly won the third and kept his seat in the 1V by the skin of his teeth.  Even more astonishingly, the whole 1V got a lot faster the week after those seat races.  You needn't wonder whether the humbling reminder lit a fire under that guy or whether beating the unbeatable guy did likewise for the rest of the crew's morale. 

Finally (I'll stop at four for the sake of brevity despite feeling as though I'm just getting started), there's the story that I heard from a younger coach about a high school rower who complained to his fellow rowers "Coach isn't giving me enough credit for everything I do and have done for this crew."  Are you kidding me?  Anyone who even dares to think that needs an immediate attitude adjustment.  Anyone who actually says it should be demoted to a regimen of land-training-only, or maybe just cut, depending on the circumstances.  Fortunately for his coach and his crew, this athlete quit within a couple of weeks, or more precisely, jumped ship to a different program after being wooed by another coach who knew of his dissatisfaction with his circumstance - poached, you might call it, but good riddance in any case.  Some of his fellow rowers probably wept and gnashed their teeth at the time (the arrogant athlete had the crew's best erg time - big deal) but guess what?  That crew won their season-ending championship regatta despite having lost their "star" - who was never a star to begin with (or haven't you been paying attention?).

As soon as you've identified the star on your crew, take him out of the first boat.  He's slowing you down.  No one ever hurts a crew by quitting.  This truth speaks for itself, repeatedly and at every level, if you'll pay close attention.